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'Garbage goes with death': In Syracuse, one man's fears about the message of trashed streets

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William Hunt (left), leader of a Syracuse business association dedicated to beautification, listens as John Hunt, a neighbor, laments the condition of Lombard Avenue in Syracuse.
(Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com)

Three people died last weekend in shootings in Syracuse, raising the city's homicide toll for the year to 11. Most of the killings have been in the same neighborhoods, the poor city streets at the heart of Syracuse. They are the same places where you often find broken bags of trash, spilling such delights as rotten food and dirty diapers.

Hunt is president of the Greener East Side Business Association. He describes himself as an angry guy, frustrated by what he maintains is a lack of code enforcement by City Hall. While such longtime East Side businesses as the Syracuse Card Co. support Hunt's efforts, some city employees grumble that Hunt's group has a membership of one.

What matters is the passion Hunt brings to a civic cancer. He is African-American, concerned about the fate of children in his community. He remembers when he moved to a "clean and beautiful" Syracuse more than 30 years ago. It makes him sick to see what's happened to once-grand city streets. His symbol for decline is Lombard Avenue, a side street turned into a dumping ground for trash and construction debris, a side street his group plans to clean Saturday morning.

Neighborhood boys and girls, coming from Burger King, often use Lombard. Hunt watches some of them throw garbage on the ground, a habit he views as troubling and self-demeaning. If you raise kids on streets where they're ankle-deep in trash, they'll find their own reflection in that world. Is it any surprise, he asks, that kids who equate their self-esteem with garbage might find scant value in another person's life?

"It's all tied together, " Hunt said. "They stop caring about themselves, about the earth, about the environment. It's a form of depression. You can't separate one from another."

He is not alone in that philosophy. Darlene Williams, principal of Elmwood Elementary School on South Avenue, said some of her pupils "come from situations that are very rough." Williams tries to keep her building immaculate. A clean school, she said, is a powerful haven.

"We can't have our children walking to school through broken sidewalks, trash bags and pieces of broken glass," she said. "That sends a message to them with every step: 'We don't care about you.' We have to make sure - with our city and with our parents - that we teach our children by what we model."

Hunt's model would be a massive new commitment to cleaning up our streets. He wants municipal code enforcers to escalate their crackdown on sloppy residents, merchants and landlords. He calls for extra trash collections that would pick up rotting garbage on the streets of Syracuse.

The city, Hunt contends, "has turned into a slumlord." He defines slumlords as landowners weary of enforcing higher standards, landowners who have lost respect for their own tenants. Take a drive through the core streets of the city, Hunt insists, and that is the only conclusion you can reach.

His argument brings a pause from Vito Sciscioli, the city's commissioner of community development, whose office also oversees neighborhood code enforcement. Sciscioli is a thoughtful, well-read guy who can discuss sociology as easily as zoning laws. He used to serve as commissioner of public works, and he has sympathy for the obstacles faced every day both by trash collectors and his own staff.

"When people deal persistently with problems, on a consistent basis, they can get worn down," Sciscioli said.

He rejects the argument that trash on the streets has any corollary in youth violence. If that were true, Sciscioli responds, "people in Third World countries would be popping each other all the time." But he agrees that a child raised amid trash and debris can be wounded emotionally.

"If you grow up around garbage, you get acclimated to garbage, " he said.

Sciscioli said it's always possible for things to change. He said a community defines its own most urgent problems, and it is clear - in Syracuse - that we're all sick of trash. Poor neighborhoods, he said, often have a transient population that isn't sure about trash collection dates. Trash too often goes to the curb early. The results are broken bags, blowing litter, rotten food along the streets.

The real answer, Sciscioli maintains, is "behavior modification." That might include education and a full-blown assault on the garbage problem, dump trucks followed by workers carrying rakes and shovels. For now, he said, that's just a dream in Syracuse, a city desperate for new revenue.

To William Hunt, the fiscal challenge has become civic surrender. He wonders if the trash and debris piled up in our poorest neighborhoods would be tolerated in Strathmore, Sedgwick or Winkworth. He wonders about the self-image of city children who kick aside dirty diapers as they walk home from school. He wonders how those children might be lifted by a sweeping, high-profile cleanup of their streets.

"Garbage and trash, " Hunt asked. "What's that do to your self-worth?"